I would have guessed Simon and Garfunkel. It's around the right year, and the right harmonies, that came up in The Graduate, which I saw in Saskatoon on a one night layover between Prince Albert and Vancouver, on the way, curiously, to San Francisco.

I thought it was 'air headed' in some ways. (Drill SGT, you and I must be exactly the same age )

"You're going to meet some gentle people there". Well, having been there at that time some is the operative word. More likely political radicals, protestors against anything, dopey starry eyed wishful thinkers, off beat religious weirdos, lots of drug addicts and many people more than willing to rip you off, steal your stuff and just out and out use you. Other than that....good times :-)

This song was composed to be an advertisement for the Monterey Pop Festival. And also a message to people heading here to be mellow. Which they were until they were not. (Not the natural human condition.)

I had an aunt and uncle living in the Haight during the Summer of Love (1967). From what I understand you did meet a lot of gentle people there.

It was later when the place was overrun with runaways and speed freaks that things changed for the worse. Many of the gentle people, including my aunt and uncle, moved away to small towns or to the country.

You`re like an old time movie Baby, yes I need your love But I`m not gonna get this low Don`t you think that I can tell When you`ve got no place else to go Could it be you understood When you tried to read my mind Cause this time you will find I`m gonna let you go Every time I see you.

Those of us who grew up in San Francisco prior to the arrival of the hippies don't particularly care for this song, seeing how it invited all the hippies and those who consistently vote for left-wing bullshit that has since destroyed what was, once, a great and productive city.

Now it's just a laboratory for ongoing, failed liberalism with great vistas.

That, and home to a kick-ass football team that will break your football team.

Were you near the Civic Center? That's where the poopers gather. Also, on BART. Recent issue with the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit-subway-system) b/c the escalators to get to the trains are broken due to being clogged with poop. They had to bring in Hazmat to clean the escalator due to the poopers. There are inside options for sleeping and pooping, free of charge, but nnoooooo. Sadly, your point is well taken and current despite the fact that other cities aren't exactly lemony fresh either.

"It's only "air-headed" to that very serious girl in the picture in the law library basement."

Are you talking about that "famous" picture of me taken when I was a 30-year-old mother doing a take-home exam in my own apartment in Washington Square Village. I think we were on about the 9th floor. It was dark because it was — ever heard of it? — night.

"Some of those girls during that time had a very pretty look. More natural than they are now. I love the straight hair."

Girls with naturally curly or wavy hair needed "help" to get their hair straight.

60's TIP: Take two empty cans of Campbell's Soup. Tops are gone, of course, now remove the bottom. Gather hair in a ponytail on top of head. Divide hair in two parts. Roll around soup cans, with the long part of the can facing ears. Pin in place. By morning, hair is "straight".

Yes! Now I'm going to have to get the Joan Didion collections down. Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album are must reads for Californians especially. Excellent writer in her time. Has gotten a little bit precious-old-lady.

I'm surprised to read that there are people on this earth who felt touched by this song. In my neck of the woods, this song was immediately and universally mocked. "If you're going to Newark, wear a helmet on your head." The only song in my memory that was more relentlessly mocked was the Pina Colada one.

I never really noticed how little the lyrics have to say. I always thought there was more there, which is true of a lot of songs from memory. Your mind attaches extra meaning and you assume it's in the words too, but no, it's all you. That should not be disappointing, but it is. Maybe you were actually all alone back then, and didn't know it.

Ann Althouse said..."It was a fairly accurate reflection of sentiment and behavior in SFO in that time."

How do you get that? You need to read "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."

I have read, or tried to read, "S.T.B." More than any book I can think of at this moment, Didion either completely misunderstood, or willfully misapplied, the line from the poem that she employed in her title. If she wanted to see Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan needed to be in Saigon in 1967. Way more American drug addicts there than in San Francisco. And the stench! Feggedaboudit!

I always have cut her some slack though, since Joan was well into her 30s by 1967, I believe. She was relatively young, but already completely irrelevant (you only would have to view the documentary from which the McKenzie song was excerpted to understand that). I figured her being hacked off by that was, in the end, understandable.

I was in the Army's Viet-namese language school for a year in '67-68. We used to sing this & laugh, 'cause when we we going to San Francisco (actually Oakland) to ship out, we weren't going to be wearing flowers in our un-hip short hair. Later overseas, one quiet evening in our base camp in a rubber plantation, the song came on the radio and echoed nicely thru the air, just as a mild mortar attack began. Every 3 or 4 lines "flowers in your hair" boom! "gentle people there" boom! Nobody was hurt, so we laughed about it. An illustration of the 6 degrees of separation theory- a friend of mine from college in Michigan ended up as a lawyer in NYC and was briefly married to one of John Phillips many ex-wives. So I know someone who was married to someone who probably knew this songwriter!

God, how I love Joan Didion! Especially Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. For my money she is one of the top two or three American writers from the sixties on.

However, in those two books she offered an apocalyptic vision that led one to believe that not only was the Summer of Love in San Francisco an utter disaster, but Western Civilization itself was hanging in the balance. She was equally breathless and alarming in her evocation of LA, as though there were dozens of guerilla Manson families prowling the wealthy neighborhoods in search of pregnant movie stars to eviscerate, and Didion, with her migraine-sensitized antennae, was exactly the right artiste to forecast the horrors to come.

Didion was the literary equivalent of Paul Ehrlich and the environmentalists preaching eco-apocalypse. She wasn't entirely wrong, but she was presenting a view substantially biased to the negative.

It's like the disgusting "urine and feces" subthread here. Sure, there are homeless sanitiation problems related to the subway. But I live in San Francisco and really, unless one seeks out excreta, that's not how one perceives the city.

I play this song to the younger generation when/if they ask what "The Sixties" means and then I play "Hotel California". In "The Sixties" we went from one situation to the other - at least that was how I experienced it. Hulu is showing "No Direction Home" Part 1 and 2 which is about Bob Dylan. In a way in these films you can see the same thing - Dylan going from acoustic folk protest to electric rock poetry. I've never read anything yet that matched my experience of the Sixties just because everything moved and changed whereas writers seem to pick one static point of time within the era and judge everything from that one point. To them, it was the Summer of Love or it was Altamont. You were for the Vietnam war or against it. No one writes about a person who was for the war, against the war and then ten years later for it. Etc. There's not one great event of that time that I haven't changed my mind about at least once - except I've always felt sure the moon landing really happened

I was a percipient witness. Others may have different views, and you can choose.

I'll back Mark O and emphasize that he was speaking for all of San Francisco, not just the enclaves of runaways and druggies in the Haight and its immediate environs that Joan Didion fastened upon.

The sixties into the early seventies were complex, fucked-up and transcendent -- not to be pigeonholed easily one way or another. Actually, quite a lot of people then had deep, enriching experiences. I know I did.

I'm much more conservative now, as are many of the hippies I knew. I'll admit that I'm conflicted about that part of my heritage, but I will stand up for the sixties as a flawed but sincere attempt that humans made in the 20th century to find a way.

I'll also say that America has not settled its accounts with that era.

ZOMG Mark you did not just call Ann Althouse uptight! That is, like, the ultimate sin! Dood she will not have it. She will, like, pull a train of D- students just to show you how un-uptight she is, ok, man?

The song was just a product of the L.A. / John Phillips' hit-making machine. As someone mentioned above, the S.F. locals really didn't like the song, and the real Haight-Asbury scene had already ended by the time the so-called Summer Of Love rolled around. By the end of '67 even the Grateful Dead had moved north to Marin County.